Human rights violations in business context

Abstract

Human rights are rights that every being is entitled to just because they are human. These are universal in nature and entitle a human being to Life, Liberty, Equality, Security and much more. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in the year 1948. Among the many countries that have signed up for the UDHR, India is one. Although India is one of the signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, little has been done to promote what they are or why they are so important. Even though we are all aware of some human rights like the right to equality, most of the others skip our minds and there have been a lot of violations, especially in the corporate context. The bigger cases like the Bhopal Gas Tragedy case and the Tata Nano Singur case are examples in India that have violated basic human rights in the name of business. Although these are big cases that we are aware of because of media actively portraying the injustice that has occurred to external people, it makes us wonder if there are abuses of Human Rights of the company's own employees. And if there are any, what has the company done to deal with such cases. The Government has ensured that companies take part actively in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) although Human Rights are something more important and more of a basic need. We would like to study the policies in place that ensure companies enforce and protect Human Rights in their businesses. Cases of Human Rights violations are dealt with very severely and can damage and tarnish the image of a company and therefore little do companies want to get into that kind of a trouble. Therefore, we believe it is important to study and recommend good practices to companies. As part of our project, we would like to analyze and study how companies across India and other countries try to promote human rights while providing clear cut mechanisms to report for human rights violations. We would like to pick out the best practices across companies to a more general format that can be adopted by companies to make sure they do not end up violating human rights.